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Tuesday 22 Jan 2019 | 06:57 | SYDNEY

COMMENTS POLICY

Comments are welcomed and encouraged on The Interpreter. We use Disqus, a platform that organises and hosts comments on millions of sites across the web. To comment on The Interpreter, you will need to become a Disqus user. You can do this by using your existing Facebook, Twitter or Google account to sign in, or by registering with Disqus using your email address. Just click the box marked 'Join the discussion' on any Interpreter post page.

All comments are pre-moderated. That means the editorial staff reads them before they go live on the site, and comments can be deleted at this stage. Please be patient after you submit a comment; our editors work Australian east coast business hours.

The qualities we want to encourage in reader comments include:

Brevity: please keep your comments to fewer than 300 words.

Relevance: address the post you are commenting on rather than going off on a tangent.

Respect: The Interpreter is a place for courteous, civil conversation and debate. Please be respectful of others, use moderate language, and always play the ball, not the player.

Rigour: The Interpreter is a place for intellectually rigorous and challenging debate. By all means, use the comments to correct what you see as errors and misjudgements by contributors and other commenters, but be sure to hold your own comments to that standard too.

We will delete a comment if it is, in our opinion:

Spam or advertising. It's fine to post links to your site, but it must be relevant and informative, and you must also offer a comment on the post in question.

If you see a comment on the site which might breach these guidelines or you have any complaints about our handling of comments, please write to blogeditor@lowyinstitute.org. The editors reserve the right to delete any comments submitted to this blog without notice, and this comments policy is subject to change at any time.